How to Clean Hong Kong’s Toxic Air

While Hong Kong’s air is significantly cleaner than cities in mainland China, its roadside air pollution is more than five times worse than other major cities like New York

Hong Kong’s roadside air pollution hit record-high levels last month, with new data from the Environmental Protection Department showing that pollution at roadside monitoring stations reached “very high” levels for 9.5 percent of the time in July, August and September. The previous record, set in 2004, was 8.2 percent.

The findings have added to growing alarm about the impact of roadside air pollution. Even as Hong Kong’s overall air quality improves, pollution in the streets is getting worse. But unlike other environmental problems, like climate change, environmentalists say there are a number of straightforward ways of dealing with roadside air pollution, by implementing stricter emission controls and reducing the amount of traffic on the streets.

“When the streets in Central are pedestrianized on Sundays, the air quality is fine, but on normal working days, it keeps getting worse,” says Hung Wing-tat, an associate professor of civil engineering at the Polytechnic University and a director of the Conservancy Association, a green group that has been lobbying the government for more action on air pollution.

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How to Fix a Troublesome Highway

When Montreal’s Turcot Interchange opened in 1966, no one had seen anything quite like it. Floating one hundred pillared feet above the ground, its concrete spans swirled and swooped through the air, finally coming together in a knot of jaw-dropping proportions. It comprised over seven kilometres of road and spanned an area of seventeen acres. Underneath its four levels of overpasses and elevated ramps, boats floated on the Lachine Canal and trains chugged with freight. In an especially futuristic touch, two continuous bands of fluorescent lights glowed from the highway’s walls. Driving on it, the city unfolded before you: a skyline studded with smokestacks and steeples and the slow blink of the Farine Five Roses sign. More than a mega-project, the Turcot was a Modernist victory cry.

The Turcot still inspires, but, like any relic of a bygone era, its sheen has worn away. The railyards that once spread out from the interchange—and from which the Turcot took its name—were closed by Canadian National in 2002. Ordinary highway lights replaced the space-age illuminations when the aluminum wiring decayed. Winter road salt has soaked the structure in a corrosive brine, inflating steel reinforcement bars into rusted balloons ten times their original size, causing concrete to fall off in chunks.

In 2007, the Ministère des transports du Québec (MTQ) proposed tearing the whole thing down and building a new ground-level interchange in its place. According to the renderings, vehicular capacity would be increased by 20 percent, but the new interchange—projected to cost $1.5 billion over seven years—would require the demolition of two hundred homes, including an entire street of walkup apartments and a large loft building that housed more than four hundred people. Its embankments would cut off links between St. Henri, Côte St. Paul and the other working-class areas adjacent to the interchange.

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More Pedestrian Streets, Less Pollution

Hong Kong’s government has finally decided that sacrificing its air quality in favour of cars, buses and trucks isn’t such a good thing after all. Yesterday, in a somewhat surprising departure from its reluctance to make big plans, the government pledged to fight roadside air pollution by revamping the city’s vast bus network, planting more trees, expanding bicycle infrastructure, creating “low-emission zones” in the city’s most congested areas and permanently pedestrianizing nearly two dozen streets. Emission standards would also be tightened for boats and private vehicles.

While details on many aspects of the plan have yet to be confirmed — and of course it’s still just a proposal, with no guarantee that any of it will be actually put into place — it has the potential to drastically improve the quality of life in Hong Kong’s central areas. In Mongkok, the network of pedestrian streets already in place would be expanded, while vehicles that do not meet the highest European emission standards, known as Euro IV, would be banned from the entire neighbourhood. Vehicular access outside the pedestrian areas would also be limited.

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Taxi Culture

It occurred to my friends and I, as we were travelling in a convoy of taxis down a one-lane mountain road, that it was a bit odd that an afternoon of hiking would start with a ride in a cab. But Hong Kong is an odd place. With a remarkably few private vehicles for such a large city—less than one out of five people here own a car—taxis play a particularly important role in shuttling people around town. I can’t help but compare the culture of taxis here with that of Montreal, which also has an abundance of cabs, but whose approach to them is markedly different.

Hong Kong has more than 18,000 taxis, compared to Montreal’s 4,500, but this works out to the same per-capita ratio of about one taxi for every 400 people. (New York, by contrast, has one taxi for every 600 people, though this doesn’t reflect the fact that most cabs stay on Manhattan and neglect the outer boroughs.) In both cities, taxis are owned by a mix of companies and individuals; drivers work long hours, earn only modest wages and sometimes suffer from stress and neuroses caused by working long, solitary hours for oft-ungrateful customers. But the similarities end there.

The biggest difference is demographic. The vast majority of taxi drivers in Montreal are immigrants or ethnic minorities, just like in most other large North American cities. Many are Haitian. In Hong Kong, though, I doubt there are any non-Chinese cabbies. The way that taxis are regulated by the government differs sharply too. While cabs in both cities are licenced, Montreal takes a far more lax approach in determining the model, colour and livery of taxis — a taxi can be pretty much any type of vehicle, and most drivers opt for standard-issue Toyota Camrys. The only indication it’s a taxi is the sign on the roof.

In Hong Kong, by contrast, cabs are all customized Toyota Crowns, with red livery for taxis serving urban areas, green for those serving the New Territories and blue for cabs on Lantau Island. Like New York’s yellow cabs, they give a certain consistent hue to the streets, not to mention a certain sense of place. It’s always a mild surprise to go to Yuen Long or Tai Po and find that the taxis are green, such is the extent to which the colour red can be associated with traffic in Hong Kong.

The Grimy Side of Pokfulam

Pokfulam Road is one of Hong Kong’s posher addresses, sweeping past the leafy hills and stunning ocean views on the west side of Hong Kong Island. But its origins are far more humble: Pokfulam starts as a narrow two-lane street, besieged by the noise and exhaust of buses labouring uphill in first gear, its postwar tenements coated in a thick layer of grime. Despite the picturesque way it snakes up the hill, the bus traffic makes it a particularly unpleasant street, which might explain the number of vacant businesses and derelict buildings along it. The corner building above, with a nice curve typical of 1950s and 60s tong lau, or “Chinese building,” once housed a skin doctor and a bakery, both long gone.

Trafficopter

Trafficopter, a 1972 National Film Board documentary by Barrie Howells, isn’t especially insightful, but it is certainly stylish. Following the traffic reporter for a Montreal radio station as he soars above the morning rush hour in a small helicopter, it gazes down at a miniature city caught up in the interminable grind of daily commerce.

There are plenty of captivating images here, both of Montreal from above and some long-vanished places like the Montreal Star‘s newsroom. The last few minutes of the film, which depict the city smoking and steaming in the frigid air of a winter morning, are by far the most memorable. There’s also an interesting bit where the reporter mentions that the pollution he encounters flying over the city every day led to an infection in one of his lungs — a reminder that Montreal is probably a lot cleaner now than it was for most of its industrial history.

A nice companion piece to Trafficopter is this short clip from Luc Bourdon’s La mémoire des anges. Here, we see the Turcot Interchange shortly after its construction, images of its soaring concrete spans set to audio of mayor Jean Drapeau musing, in a very 1960s way, about the need for traffic to circulate freely.

Saigon’s Other River

Saigon owes its existence to the Saigon River, but its languid current and fetid waters aren’t quite as impressive as one might expect. The city’s real river can be found in its streets, where a roaring current of motorcycles, buses, trucks and cars rushes unceasingly for all but a few hours of the day. Although some form of official order is imposed—there are one-way streets, some road signs and the occasional traffic light—most rules of the road are flouted in favour of a more natural order of things. The guiding philosophy of traffic in Saigon is to do everything you can to get ahead without getting hit.

Rainbow Jam

Thanks to its large, multi-hued fleet of taxis and tuk-tuks, not to mention the Thai tradition of exuberantly decorating one’s vehicle, Bangkok must have the most colourful traffic in the world. That’s a good thing, too, because the traffic is jammed so often it would be awfully monotonous without such visual stimulus.

São Paulo: Green in an Unruly Metropolis

Parque Trianon, Avenida Paulista, early morning. One clue to judging the safety of a neighborhood is the presence of women out walking dogs. Despite São Paulo’s high crime rates, you see them in many areas.

São Paulo has the reputation of being a very dangerous city. Its murder rate is phenomenal: 36.9 per 100,000 people in 2004, while London’s rate was 2.4 that year, Los Angeles’s was 14 and Chicago’s 16. I didn’t know that when I picked Brazil’s industrial powerhouse as one of the cities to consider in my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places, and that’s probably a good thing because I might not have gone, and missed seeing where the rest of the world may be headed.

One of the beauties of the Internet is the ease with which you can “meet” people ahead of time to ask what to see and hear when you arrive. I had lined up appointments with city officials and academics before I left Montreal, and I’d also exchanged e-mails with two British journalists who know the city well, and who offered to meet for lunch the day I arrived to give me some tips. But I’m afraid I rather surprised these guys, because as soon as I introduced myself face-to-face I could see them swallow and consider before they spoke: obviously I was a whole lot older than the woman they were expecting.

“You can’t go there,” one of them began, when I asked about housing developments I should see.

“Don’t ride public transportation,” his friend chimed in.

“People get kidnapped at knife point in their own cars at that intersection,” the first one added.

It was enough to make me worry for a couple of hours about what I’d got myself into. But I decided I had ignore their warnings if I wanted to get a feel for this energetic place. Yes, the middle- and upper-classes are afraid, but I found that the overwhelming majority of people were extremely nice to strangers as they go about their ordinary lives. In fact, I think I stumbled on a great indicator of a neighborhood’s safety — the presence of women of a certain age walking dogs. I found them all over the city during the day, at least, taking the cachorrinho out to do his business and patrolling the street at the same time.

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